“ Most of Infocom's games were written in ‘Zork Implementation Language,’ which was native to no particular platform or processor, but ready to be interpreted on all kinds of systems by versions of its Z-Machine. The Z-Machine could be considered the first real game development engine, so long as nobody fact-checks that statement too hard.”
A very cringy article where someone who doesn’t really know about pseudo-code thinks ZIL was novel.
Donald Knute wrote some of the earliest pseudocode for his books on Computer Science, decades before Infocom existed.
P-Code was what the Pascal compiler compiled down to. I wrote a compiler and linker for an IBM 360 (punched cards, no less) that ran pseudocode. Again, about five years before Infocom was a wet dream.
Pseudocode isn’t complex or difficult, but I can see how many today might see it as novel. Nor is it a “virtual machine” as they emulate real devices.
I told you it’s cringy.
@feloneouscat ah yes 360 mod 90 and thousands of punchcards. i might still have some. lol
@feloneouscat Possible they meant virtual machine in the Java JVM sense?
Possible. So much in this article is wrong or incorrect.
BTW it’s KNUTH not Knute. Didn’t check my spelling.
@feloneouscat
Even Plotkin's blog post is iffy. Bummer.